On 20 Apr 2015, at 13:52, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 8:40 AM, Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au
<mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>> wrote:
Dennis Ochei wrote:
One must revise the everyday concept of personal identity
because it isn't even coherent. It's like youre getting mad at
him for explaining combustion without reference to phlogiston.
He can't use the everyday notion because it is a convenient
fiction.
I don't think phlogiston is an everyday concept. Not anymore. It
was made obsolete by a better theory, which was not required to
take phlogiston into account, because phlogiston was just a made up
explanation that happened to fit the observations available at the
time.
No, phlogiston was a serious scientific theory. It required careful
experimentation to demonstrate that the theory did not really fit
the facts easily (you would require negative mass, for instance).
The closest continuer concept of personal identity is far from an
unsophisticated everyday notion, or a convenient fiction. I
wasn't familiar with the concept so I looked at several sources. I
will summarize it in my own words, so that you can please correct
me if I misunderstand something:
In case of branching (through something like duplication machines,
body swaps, non-destructive teleportations, etc..), only one or
zero branches will be the true continuation of the original. In
some cases the true continuation is the one that more closely
resembles the original psychologically, which can be determined by
following causality chains. In the case of a tie, no branch is a
true continuation of the original.
It involves a lot more than psychological resemblance. The point is
that personal identity is a multidimensional concept. It includes
continuity of the body, causality, continuity, access to memories,
emotional states, value systems, and everything else that goes to
make up a unique person. Although all of these things change with
time in the natural course of events, we say that there is a unique
person in this history. Closest continuer theory is a sophisticated
attempt to capture this multidimensionality, and acknowledges that
the metric one might use, and the relative weights placed on
different dimensions, might be open to discussion. But it is clear
that in the case of ties (in whatever metric you are using), new
persons are created -- the person is not duplicated in any
operational sense.
Again, please correct me if I am misrepresenting the theory or
missing something important.
If what I said above is correct, this is just akin to a legal
definition, not a serious scientific or philosophical theory. It
makes a statement about a bunch of mushy concepts. What is a "true
continuation"? How is the causality chain introduced by a train
journey any different from the one introduced by a teleportation?
If Everett's MWI is correct, then this theory holds that there is
no true continuation -- every single branching from one observer
moment to the next introduces a tie in closeness. Which is fine by
me, but then we can just ignore this entire "true continuation"
business.
MWI is in no way equivalent to Bruno's duplication situation. He
acknowledges this. The point about MWI is that the continuers are in
different worlds. There is no dimension connecting the worlds, so
there is no metric defining this difference. Each can then be
counted as the closest continuer /in that world/ -- with no
possibility of conflicts.
If you want to revise it to some alternative definition of
personal
identity that is better suited to your purposes, then you have
to do
the necessary analytical work.
There isn't a single reference to "personal identity" that I could
find in the UDA paper. The work does lead to conclusions about
personal identity (as does Everett's MWI) but it doesn't start from
there. Please be specific about what you find incorrect in the
reasoning.
Read the COMP(2013) paper. There are many references to personal
identity in that, including the quote given by Liz: "The notion of
the first person, or /the conscious knower/, admits the simplest
possible definition: it is provided by access to basic memories."
In other words, Bruno is using only one dimension of personal
identity and basing his argument on that, to the exclusion of all
the other relevant dimensions. This is a serious limitation on the
argument since two quite different people can share a large
proportion of their memories, especially if they have lived closely
together for many years. And yet they suffer from no confusion of
their separate identities. Access to personal memories (as given in
personal diaries) is not an adequate criterion for personal identity.
Certainly. That is why I insist in saying that the notion of personal
identity is out-of-topic.
We need only to use the amount needed to say "yes" to the doctor at
step zero.
But once you accept, for the sake of the argument, step zero, then the
multidimensional notion of personal identity is, by definition,
preserved at step zero, and easily shown preserved, in all remaining
steps of the argument.
Only the *difference* in the diaries contents needs to be used to get
the relative first person indeterminacy in the self-multiplication
experience.
That means that your argument is not relevant for invalidating the UDA
reasoning.
We need to take into account only what is relevant for the reasoning.
(That type of argument might perhaps been tried to invalidate comp
(step 0), but that remains to be proved. All attempts to falsify
computationalism or mechanism have failed, and been shown to either
beg the question (most of the times), or contain other errors).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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